About Me

JAMIE BRYDONE-JACK

Writer, Nurse, Daughter, Sister, Aunt, Great-Aunt

I’ve been cooking for longer than I can remember, as family pictures will attest. I always liked to help in the kitchen, whether it was cooking or cleaning up. There are pictures of me with a chair pulled up to a counter or table just so I could help! The top cover photo of the family cookbook is me and my older sister Tami helping Mom make pizza.  I was around 2 years old, and–yes–I was standing on a chair to reach the counter and clearly having great fun helping.

Over the years, I learned so many things standing beside my mother cooking!  When I was a teenager, I typically helped with the family meal, making whatever bread was going to be eaten and/or helping chop ingredients for our salads.  When I moved out on my own, I took what she taught with me.  I can still remember the first Thanksgiving that I cooked by myself.  I used family favorites as well as a few new ones…some of which I still use this day and have a place in our family cookbook.  

I started running recipe mailing lists on the Internet back in 1998.  For people who don’t remember those, we basically shared recipes via email through a listserver that passed all messages on to all members. I became a “listmom” by accident. A list owner of a growing crockpot list asked for my assistance, and eventually, she gave it to me to solely run. I enjoyed this very much. One of the things I did with my list members was a virtual recipe swap; you’ll see several recipes in the family cookbook that I got from the swaps that became favorites! Sharing great recipes with amazing home cooks is something I miss about not running cooking lists anymore.  By the time I stopped running lists, I had them for a variety of themes, like Soups-n-Stews, Restaurant-Recipes, Morning-Meals, Clipping-Cooking (for “clipped” recipes from newspapers and magazines), and several ones where we only shared Mastercook formatted recipes. List members knew me as Jamie Rahm, as I was married at the time.

One Christmas, I gave all of my family food mixes tailored to them.  They were a hit!  It sparked an idea for my then-husband and I.  In the early 2000s, we opened a specialty food store in Fort Bragg, California, called Cooking Up Ideas that sold not only packaged and bottled foodstuff but also my own mixes that I got from a variety of sources and tweaked for our purposes.  Cooking Up Ideas went out of business in the early 2010s.  I’ve included some of our special mixes in the family cookbook.

I particularly enjoy appliance cooking.  My favorites are the bread machine and the slow cooker; I have multiple recipes in the family cookbook for those appliances. I was an omnivore until my mid-thirties, and now I am a vegetarian with vegan aspirations. So you’ll find some of my old meat recipes in the family cookbook along with vegetarian/vegan ones.

After a divorce, I went back to school in my mid-forties and became a registered nurse. I work at a local hospital as a generalist bedside nurse.

The picture is me and my dad on Easter when I was about 3 1/2 years old.